Linux 2.1.98

Linux 2.1.98

I just released a fairly small patch to 97 to bring it up to 98.

I've gotten a lot of patches in the mail for the last week, and I've been
ignoring most of them for obvious reasons. They aren't in any in-queue,
you can more-or-less consider them lost - but don't resend them all
immediately, because if I get another huge batch of patches then I'll just
have to ignore them again.

We're going slow and easy, and the plan is to not only keep me sane in the
midst of all the diapers, but I'll also at the same time take the
opportunity to actually enforce the feature-freeze. You've known about it
for a long time, _tough_.

Anyway, 2.1.98 _should_ fix:

 - the IDE/SCSI lockups. The irq enable/disable code was broken, and could
   do some really bad things. This tended to lock up the machine if you
   accessed your IDE disks heavily, or in particular if you had a mixture
   of IDE and SCSI and used them at the same time. Tell me if you still
   have problems - I'm sure there are still bugs left, and I want to hear
   about them.
 - memory management especially on small-memory machines. I think I made a
   good change to the allocation logic, and I'm hoping it will fix the bad
   bahevaiour on those wimpy machines that all you losers out there are
   using that have less than half a Gig of RAM. It certainly still works
   fine on my machine, and I'm certainly still too lazy to test it out on
   anything smaller.

There's a few other updates too: the asm constraints are fixed, so it
should compile again with other compiler versions than the particular one
I happen to be using. And some of the SCSI drivers have been updated a
bit.

There's been a lot of discussion and patches on capabilities, and I
haven't applied them yet, I'll let them simmer a bit. Similarly, I've seen
so many pathes to kmod that my head is spinning, and as I don't use
modules myself I'd really like to get feedback from users about the
different patches, so that maybe I'll get something that everybody can
agree on as acceptable. Right now I don't know which patch I should even
begin looking at.

                Linus